Some time last year, I stopped editing and sharing photos. I didn’t stop making photos, but after the shutter-clicked, the process stopped. I just couldn’t get excited enough about my images to do anything with them. Partly I think my own standards have got a bit high with my own work – I have to be really happy with images before I share them, and nothing I was making quite lived up to my expectations.

Jumping in to snorkel at the Poor Knights islands is a huge perk of my research work out there. We don’t have a shower on the island, so to get clean after rolling around on the ground checking burrows, we jump in the sea. Sometimes I take my little Olympus-Tough camera, and snap away at the marine life. I’m not an underwater photographer, the gear is prohibitively expensive for a PhD budget. But this camera does me well enough to make memories, and to help ID things when I emerge.

I love this photo. The colours and patterns make me happy, and the simplicity of it. I think this is a blue-eyed triplefin on a boring sponge, but I’m happy to be corrected by someone who knows more about marine life than me!